Scandal essay

A cover article on Sept. 21 examined the effects of the Gary Hart-Donna Rice scandal on American politics. After the article was published, former journalists for The Miami Herald disputed one aspect of the chronology of the week they pursued the Gary Hart story: when Herald journalists first saw a New York Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’ In interviews before publication, the reporter Tom Fiedler confirmed seeing that article for the first time on Saturday, May 2, as he flew to Washington to join a stakeout of Hart’s townhouse. But after publication, Fiedler recalled that he may actually have seen the Times article on Thursday or Friday. Jim McGee and James Savage, Fiedler’s former colleagues at The Herald, recall that McGee became aware of the article on Friday, before McGee flew to Washington. Fiedler then showed the article to Savage on the plane on Saturday. Therefore, it is very likely that the original version of this article, based in large part on Fiedler’s account, referred incorrectly to the point at which any of the Herald journalists first saw the Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’

More substantively, I don’t think the problem is one of outrage, or outrage culture. After all, you seem fairly outraged at Tuvalu’s treatment yourself. Instead, the issue seems to be what people do or don’t do with their outrage. It used to be that people used their outrage to write responses and critiques of those they were outraged at. Nowadays, people seek the removal of whatever caused their outrage. You see this here but also in campus culture more generally. From what I can tell, this is reflects a generational difference; millennials seem to want anything that disturbs or outrages them to cease to exist, and some non-millennial professors pander to this, wanting to be seen as woke or something. It’s all very troubling and ultimately antithetical to the philosophic enterprise.